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3 “Everywhere You Go,It’s There” Forgetting and Remembering the University of Texas Tower Shootings Rosa A.Eberly Meyer: “Can you look at that Tower and not think of Whitman?” Pryor: “No. You just can’t do it.” Interview of Richard “Cactus” Pryor, Austin native, longtime radio host, and author, by Chuck Meyer, host of Good Morning Austin, KLBJ-AM, August 1, 1996 John Sayles chose to end Lone Star, his epic ¤lm about Texas,with the command “Forget the Alamo.”1 However contested memories of the Alamo have been, the Alamo most certainly has been remembered.2 Forget the Alamo? Why? How? Sayles has said of his ¤lm: A lot of what this movie is about is history and what we do with it. Do we use it to hit each other? Is it something that drags us down? Is it something that makes us feel good? You can get six different people to look at the Alamo and they have six different stories about what actually happened and what its signi¤cance was.The same goes for your personal history. At what point do you say about your parents , “that was them, this is me. I take responsibility for myself from this day on.” That’s also what this movie is about.3 Sayles’s claim that certain memories should be forgotten as well as his distinction between individual and collective memories provide a regional context for understanding some of the different ways the 1966 shootings at the University of Texas at Austin have been remembered and why,arguably , some people and institutions might prefer that they be forgotten. Herein I review some of the discursive artifacts that perpetuate different memories of what happened on August 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman , a former Marine enrolled as an undergraduate engineering major at the University of Texas at Austin,killed fourteen and injured thirty-one by sharpshooting randomly for over an hour from the observation deck atop theUTTower.4 In addition this chapter will suggest how public discourses about these artifacts most often blur distinctions among individual, cultural , institutional, and public memories. Because this study was conducted largely through my undergraduate rhetoric course titled “The UT Tower and Public Memory,” this chapter will also recount some anecdotal evidence about interactions between and among various publics, institutions , and special interests regarding memories of the shootings and the status of the Tower itself as a topos.5 This essay thus serves as an active reminder—not merely a nostalgic recollection—of rhetoric’s productive and practical as well as critical or hermeneutic powers to use and shape memory through discourse. That the events of August 1, 1966, are remembered—at least by individuals —¤rst became clear to me as I listened to local talk radio on August 1, 1995, the twenty-ninth anniversary of the shootings. What I heard on KLBJ-AM’s Paul Pryor Show that day ultimately convinced me that the events of August 1, 1966—and how those events are remembered by individuals , publics, and institutions—deserved study, deliberation, and perhaps intervention. After an initial one-hour segment with guests, Paul Pryor, son of “Cactus” Pryor (mentioned above), opened the phone lines to callers who had memories of the day. Paul Pryor had promoted the show by saying it would focus on the anniversary of the Tower shootings and several other topics, but calls recounting individual memories continued throughout the afternoon, extending Pryor’s three-hour show. In addition to the many individuals who apparently needed to tell where they were and what they remembered of the day twenty-nine years before, Pryor’s studio guests offered a provocative gloss on the status of individual, institutional, and public memories of the shootings. Pryor’s guests for the opener were Neal Spelce,a UT alumnus who was 66 / Rosa A.Eberly news director of Austin’s KTBC radio and television in 1966 and whose voice is often associated with coverage of the shootings,6 as well as Phil Miller and Les Reedy, both KTBC reporters in 1966.As Miller recounted his memory of seeing Austin policeman Billy Speed fatally shot by Whitman through a six-inch gap in a concrete baluster—what is often described as Whitman’s “best shot”—Pryor asked Miller if he still thought of what happened that day. “Does that still affect you today, Phil? Do you think about that?” Miller: “Yes.” Pryor: “I bet you do. You never forget that.” Miller: “I was going...

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